Public Relationists Ascendant! Please Sir, May I Have Some Policy…Sara Mead Is Going To Clean You Out! Biddle With Rights Talk, Aldeman Talks Pensions (Pensions Are The Plumbing), Life Advice From Tilson, Whistleblowing Or Bullying? Bellwether In Rock Videos.

Quick primer to understanding most education debates. If you look at them from the perspective of, “is this good or bad for kids, or does this matter to kids?” you’ll constantly be baffled by what is going down. If, by contrast, you look at it through the lens of public relations – is this good for the “system” as it currently exists, vested interests or stakeholders (and those can include reform interests), or various political interests then there is a logic to most of this. We’ve discussed this before but as debates about ESSA accountability break out good to bear in mind.

RiShawn Biddle and Jeremy Lott call for right to teach laws. They pinpoint some real problems but I think I’d prefer ‘right to hire’ as the framing. The problem now is people think teachers have a right to teach, rather than it being an important earned trust. I’ve literally heard public officials says, “but that person who really wants to teach, who are we to say they can’t.” I don’t think anyone has a right to teach – it’s an important job! School administrators should have more latitude about who to hire for that important job – especially considering the convergence of research around the finding that there are greater differences within various routes into teaching than between them. But, that’s a right to hire, not a right to teach.

The court on Thursday delivered a victory Christie when it ruled New Jersey does not owe public-sector retirees cost-of-living payments suspended under a 2011 law. It effectively keeps the state from having its unfunded liability grow by about $17.5 billion.

The case reaches back to a nearly 5-year-old law passed by a Democrat-led Legislature and signed by Christie that suspended cost-of-living adjustments.

“I’ve thrown a lot at you here, so let me quickly summarize: defense wins championships, work hard, and be nice. If you do these things, I promise you that you’ll lead a long and rewarding life, filled with love, laughter and happiness. It’s yours for the taking.”

A big piece of the “outsider” narrative is, of course, the firing of New Orleans’ teachers in the wake of the flood. There were few alternatives for a school district with no money, few schools and a student (and teacher) population scattered across the south. It was a terrible yet necessary choice and the pot-stirring and political myth-making obscures some hard realities. Subtler factors impacted teachers after the storm as well. One was Louisiana’s teacher pension system. Most charter schools did not participate in the state pension plan – it made no fiscal sense for them to do so. It likewise made little sense for a teacher already covered by the system to move to a nonparticipating school because they would stop earning toward their pension. “If they asked about the pension, I was almost certain to lose the hire” one person involved in staffing new schools after the storm says.

“I still remember a teacher who came in, she had grown up in St. Bernard [Parish], had been a teacher for a number of years and gave a killer sample lesson,” this person recounts. “I would put her in the top 5 percent of teachers I interviewed. I gave her an offer on the spot and she showed immediate excitement. When I followed up with the benefits package she was confused that there was no information about the pension. I watched as her face dropped and her entire demeanor changed when I told her. I knew I had lost her.”

We do a lot of work on the pensions issue but I’m not saying that fixing pensions is some sort of cure-all or even close in NOLA or more generally. Rather, even getting those policies right would leave a lot of important issues unaddressed. But, issues like pensions are the basic plumbing of the sector and when they’re misaligned from larger goals those goals won’t be addressed and the lack of attention to the plumbing is startling.

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